Halfway down the track, Nixon stops. He thwacks his machete into a stump to free his hands and reaches over a stone wall, groping for something in the vegetation beneath. A moment later he pulls up a clear plastic bag and hands it over. It is full of human bones. “Incas.”
Since the Spanish never found this place, Nixon, the custodian, is surely right about the bones. They belong to the people who built Choquequirao, one of the most remote Inca settlements in the Andes, and were stashed here by the archaeologists who, over the past 20 years, have been slowly freeing the ruins from the cloud forest. The site that has emerged looks like a film director’s fantasy of a lost city. A time lapse of clouds is drifting across the ridge, above a geometry of Inca stairways and terraces cut into a steep, jungly spur above the Apurímac river, 100 miles west of Cusco in southern Peru.
Inevitably, it’s been called the “sister” of Machu Picchu. But while Peru’s poster girl is surrounded by the paparazzi crush of up to 2,500 visitors a day, Choquequirao (the Quechua name means “cradle of gold”) is almost entirely deserted. It’s not hard to see why: at least two days of mules, sweat, and wild camping separate these ruins from the nearest road or hot shower. The reward for those adventurous enough to make the trek is an Inca sanctuary that still feels, in Rudyard Kipling’s phrase, like “something lost behind the ranges.”
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I am Jeff Clark, founder of Internet Brothers, producer of this blog, and passionate about hiking. I live in Western NC near the Blue Ridge and Great Smoky Mountains. Pisgah and Nantahala National Forests are just out my door, so the content will focus on these areas, but let me know what you would like to see on the site. 
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